Open Access

ARTICLE

A Transfer Learning Based Approach for COVID-19 Detection Using Inception-v4 Model

by Ali Alqahtani¹, Shumaila Akram², Muhammad Ramzan^2,3,*, Fouzia Nawaz², Hikmat Ullah Khan⁴, Essa Alhashlan⁵, Samar M. Alqhtani¹, Areeba Waris⁶, Zain Ali⁷

1 College of Computer Science and Information Systems, Najran University, Najran, 61441, Saudi Arabia
2 Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Sargodha, Sargodha, 40100, Pakistan
3 School of Systems and Technology, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, 54782, Pakistan
4 Department of Computer Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Wah Campus, Islamabad, 47040, Pakistan
5 Department of Medical Imaging, King Khaled Hospital, Najran, 61441, Saudi Arabia
6 Electrical & Electronics Engineering Department, Universiti Teknologi, Petronas, 31750, Malaysia
7 Department of Electrical Engineering, HITEC University, Taxila, 47080, Pakistan

* Corresponding Author: Muhammad Ramzan. Email:

Intelligent Automation & Soft Computing 2023, 35(2), 1721-1736. https://doi.org/10.32604/iasc.2023.025597

Received 29 November 2021; Accepted 13 January 2022; Issue published 19 July 2022

Abstract

Coronavirus (COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2) is a novel viral infection that started in December 2019 and has erupted rapidly in more than 150 countries. The rapid spread of COVID-19 has caused a global health emergency and resulted in governments imposing lock-downs to stop its transmission. There is a significant increase in the number of patients infected, resulting in a lack of test resources and kits in most countries. To overcome this panicked state of affairs, researchers are looking forward to some effective solutions to overcome this situation: one of the most common and effective methods is to examine the X-radiation (X-rays) and computed tomography (CT) images for detection of Covid-19. However, this method burdens the radiologist to examine each report. Therefore, to reduce the burden on the radiologist, an effective, robust and reliable detection system has been developed, which may assist the radiologist and medical specialist in effective detecting of COVID. We proposed a deep learning approach that uses readily available chest radio-graphs (chest X-rays) to diagnose COVID-19 cases. The proposed approach applied transfer learning to the Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) model, Inception-v4, for the automatic detection of COVID-19 infection from chest X-rays images. The dataset used in this study contains 1504 chest X-ray images, 504 images of COVID-19 infection, and 1000 normal images obtained from publicly available medical repositories. The results showed that the proposed approach detected COVID-19 infection with an overall accuracy of 99.63%.

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